Tuesday, December 31, 1996

This list was created by taking Cash Box magazine’s top 100 song list (see here) and putting the songs in order by year and then by putting songs which hit #1 on Cash Box in order by number of weeks. In the event of ties, the song with more points in Dave’s Music Database was ranked higher.

Saturday, October 26, 1996

Braxton was a preacher’s daughter “raised in a household where pop music was strictly forbidden.” KX In 1990, she recorded with her sisters as The Braxtons, but by 1992 she’d launched a solo career. In 1993, she landed the Grammy for Best New Artist and found her way into the top 10 of the pop charts with “Another Sad Love Song” and “Breathe Again”.

Braxton’s second album, Secrets, proved she would not suffer the Best New Artist Grammy curse of disappearing from the music scene. Lead-off single “You’re Makin’ Me High” was a #1 hit which won a Grammy for R&B Female Vocal.

However, even more successful was the album’s second single, “Un-Break My Heart”, a ballad of “blistering heartbreak” SF in which Braxton begs a former lover to return and undo the pain he has caused. SF In her “distinctive, husky alto” BB100 Braxton delivered a performance which was “both poignant and hopeful.” TB The song’s eleven weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100 put it amongst the biggest #1 songs of all time. It sold more than 4 million worldwide and won her yet another Grammy – this one for Pop Female Vocal.

The song was written by Diane Warren who’d penned such #1 hits as Chicago’s “Look Away” and Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me”, but this was her most successful song in the U.S. in terms of chart performance. SF Warren said she knew immediately that “Heart” would be a hit, but that Braxton didn’t want to sing it. Even after the song succeeded, Braxton told Warren she “didn’t want another one of those”. SF

Friday, September 13, 1996

On September 7, 1996, rapper/actor Tupac Shakur (generally referred to as 2Pac) attended the Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon boxing match in Las Vegas, Nevada. When Shakur and his Death Row Records entourage left the MGM Grand Hotel, a fight broke out. Later that night, Shakur was in the riding to an event with Death Row’s Suge Knight when a car pulled up beside them and fired roughly 13 shots at the car. Shakur was hit four times. He died a week later on September 13, 1996. He was 25.

He is estimated to have sold more than 100 million albums worldwide. His songs often depicted the harsh realities of ghetto life, largely inspired by his own upbringing in East Harlem. His parents’ background as members of the Black Panthers also shaped the social commentary in 2Pac’s music. Shakur faced trouble with the law and was caught up in the East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry commonly assumed to be the reason for his gang-style killing.

His music career started with Digital Underground in 1990. He worked as a roadie and backup dancer and contributed a rap on their “Same Song” for the 1991 film Nothing But Trouble. He launched his solo career that same year with 2Pacalypse Now. Me Against the World (1995) and All Eyez on Me (1996) are both DMDB top 1000 albums and went to #1, a position he attained three more times posthumously. He’s charted more than 20 albums; only four were released in his lifetime. Eleven of his albums have been top tens.

Review:
Beck’s song “Loser” “became the alternative-rock anthem of the summer” TB of 1994, but “many self-styled citizens of the alternative nation wrote him off as a one-hit wonder.” EW However, anyone who gave the “wildly eclectic Mellow Gold an open-minded listen knows that Beck Hansen is no novelty-tune phony.” EW The follow-up album proved to be “an eclectic melting pot of ideas,” TB which showcased “Beck’s rock-chameleon identity” EW via an ability “to jump from genre to genre in the manner of David Bowie in the 1970s.” TB With his “technicolor version of his Woody Guthrie-meets-Grandmaster Flash vision,” RSOdelay “found Beck collecting the grooves of generations past and reshaping them into a postmodern tapestry, merging countless samples and styles into one cohesive whole.” SL “Songs frequently morph from one genre to another, seemingly unrelated genre – bursts of noise give way to country songs with hip-hop beats, easy listening melodies transform into a weird fusion of pop, jazz, and cinematic strings.” AMG

An important trait to Beck’s success is his “whacked-out street poetry” EW and “ever-present sense of humor: Without straying into Weird Al territory, he imbues his lyrics with a healthy sense of the absurd – something almost entirely lacking in rock today. ‘'I got a stolen wife and a rhinestone life, and some good old boys/ I’m writing my will on a three-dollar bill,'’ he sings in ‘Sissyneck’.” EW “‘Devil’s Haircut’ describes a demented hell while The New Pollution parodies an age-old caricature of corrupt women.” SL

Credit also goes to “sampledelic producers the Dust Brothers,” RS who were “responsible for the smorgasbord of tasty, left-field samples on the Beastie Boys’ seminal Paul’s Boutique.” EW As a result, Odelay samples everyone from Tchaikovsky to the Frogs EW and tracks are filled “with background tambourines, maracas, and synthesizers, lending the album much of its bizarre, oddly gratifying texture.” SL

It isn’t just that Beck “accomplishes his sonic experiment” SL with “resolute confidence” SL and surprisingly “relative coherency.” SL The album is a “defining statement of an entire generation in the throes of finding its own voice.” SL “Odelay can be seen as the artist’s own cheeky response to other Gen X alternative acts.” SL He “completely ignored the angst-driven nihilistic trends of the grunge bands” SLAMG by “channeling the independent exuberance of alternative’s New Wave roots” SL and “demonstrating to his rock peers that turntables had a brighter future than refried grunge.” RS Beck “asks us to look past our conventional views of what something should or shouldn’t sound like.” SL “Odelay was just as much a swan song for alternative’s passing era as it was the ushering in of a new generation of pop music that was ever so left-of-center.” SL This is “vital music with a flea market ‘tude.” ZS

Above track listing based on 2000 Decca reissue. Songs with an asterisk (*) are on original 1946 cast album.

c Songs unique to cast album.

Soundtrack:

Main Title (THE MGM STUDIO ORCHESTRA) s

Colonel Buffalo Bill (KEENAN WYNN) s

Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly (BETTY HUTTON/ CHILDREN’S CHORUS) *

The Girl That I Marry (HOWARD KEEL) *

You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun (BETTY HUTTON) *

There’s No Business Like Show Business (HOWARD KEEL) *

They Say It’s Wonderful (HOWARD KEEL) *

They Say It’s Wonderful (Reprise) (BETTY HUTTON) s

There’s No Business Like Show Business (Reprise) (BETTY HUTTON) s

My Defenses Are Down (HOWARD KEEL/ MALE CHORUS) *

I’m an Indian, Too (BETTY HUTTON/ MALE CHORUS)

European Montage (THE MGM STUDIO ORCHESTRA) s

Let’s Go West Again (BETTY HUTTON/ MALE CHORUS) s

The Girl That I Marry (Reprise) (BETTY HUTTON) *

I Got the Sun in the Morning (BETTY HUTTON/ CHORUS) *

Together Again (THE MGM ORCHESTRA) s

Anything You Can Do (HOWARD KEEL) *

Finale/End Title (BETTY HUTTON) s

Above track listing based on 2000 Rhino reissue. Songs with an asterisk (*) are on original 1950 soundtrack.

s Songs unique to soundtrack.

Notes: The 2000 Decca reissue added four new songs. “‘Colonel Buffalo Bill’ and ‘I'm a Bad, Bad Man,’ were not recorded back in 1946, nor was an overture.” WR-C addition, “for the 20th anniversary revival in 1966, Berlin wrote a new song, ‘An Old-Fashioned Wedding’.” WR-CThese four songs appear to be from “a 1973 British studio cast recording featuring Merman.” WR-C

The 2000 Rhino reissue of the soundtrack rounded out the original paltry 8 songs to a total of 31 songs, including the original recordings by Judy Garland before she was replaced by Betty Hutton.

* As was common in the pre-rock era, multiple versions of a single song from a Broadway show would become hits. All chart positions are from the U.S. Billboard pop charts.

Review:

“Irving Berlin came from the old school of Broadway songwriters who did not write songs specifically for characters and plot points, but rather as independent numbers in shows that were more revues than book musicals per se.” WR-C However, when Jerome Kern died suddenly, Berlin was able to adapt and develop Dorothy and Herbert Fields’ Annie Oakley musical “in the spirit of integrated musicals that producers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had established with Oklahoma! only three years before.” WR-C

“Berlin’s songs for Annie Get Your Gun were all about character and plot, from the bawdy Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly, in which Annie affirms the value of a common-sense barnyard education, to the witty Anything You Can Do, which illuminates her final confrontation and reconciliation with love interest Frank Butler. Ordinarily, that should have meant that the songs were less easy to extract for the hit parade, but in fact Berlin’s score produced more chart hits through cover versions than any Broadway score before or since.” WR-C

“Oklahoma! had also established the popularity of original cast albums, and only ten days after the…Broadway opening, star Ethel Merman was in a recording studio with other members of the stage production to record 12 songs from the show…For reasons not yet explained, second leads Betty Ann Nyman and Kenny Bowers were not present, and for the recording of their duet Who Do You Love, I Hope?, they were replaced by Robert Lenn and Kathleen Carnes.” WR-C

“Merman and her co-star Ray Middleton were Broadway veterans of the pre-microphone era, experts at projecting their voices from the footlights to the rear balcony, and their stage styles carried over to the recording.” WR-C

“Merman, of course, possessed a clarion voice that was never better represented than in songs like ‘Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly’ and I Got the Sun in the Morning, while Middleton’s sonorous baritone informed The Girl That I Marry and My Defenses Are Down. And when the two got together on They Say It’s Wonderful and especially ‘Anything You Can Do,’ the belting reached near-bellow status.” WR-C

“But that isn’t to say the songs, crafted for the performers, didn’t support their interpretations. Berlin wrote simply and directly, his jokes broad, his emotions direct, and the singers hit his meanings as surely as they did his notes. The result was exactly what a cast album should be, an accurate representation of the music of a show. And since this show was a landmark in Broadway history, that made the cast album an important contribution to musical history as well as an aural delight.” WR-C

Four years after the musical, Annie Get Your Gun was turned into a movie. A third of the songs were dropped, but ten remained, including ‘Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly,’ There’s No Business Like Show Business, and ‘Anything You Can Do.’ WR-S

MGM initially planned for Judy Garland, its biggest musical star, to step into Ethel Merman’s shoes. However, “her erratic behavior caused her to be suspended from the studio and the production to be shut down until Hutton was borrowed from Paramount.” WR-S “Betty Hutton brought her usual energy and effervescence to her portrayal, and Howard Keel, in his first major movie role, gave her strong support. The result was one of the biggest box-office hits of 1950.” WR-S